I’m headed to San Francisco, one of my most favorite cities, to join the Zephyr Designer Retreat and stay at the amazing Proper Hotel. When Zephyr reached out with the invite, I was excited to tour their showroom and check out how all their products work. Fu-Tung Cheng has designed a new line for them, and I’m excited to hear him talk about the inspiration behind it all.

I’ve been spending a lot of time talking appliances with clients lately so I can’t wait to check out this wine cooler, and this wall hood. Also fun is the ability to have ventilation above a kitchen island without having a range hood come down right in the middle of it! Below is the Zephyr Lux Island.

As a little backstory, my husband and I renovated and designed a 1925 Craftsman in downtown Orlando in 2009. We had our first son shortly after, when I decided to take time off work to be with him. I created a sewing pattern for a fox stuffed animal, called him Henry the Fox (after my son Henry), and started Walnut Animal Society. Our home and the whole Walnut crew were featured in Country Living, where my publisher, Cameron Books found me and asked to write a children's book about my characters.

Writing the text for the first book, Henry's Bright Idea, was pretty surreal. I had thought about these characters for so long in the process of creating them, so to put their stories on paper was incredibly fun. But I had no idea how fun the next part would be—basically interior designing their world! Our lovely illustrator Wednesday Kirwan sent back some initial sketches for the book. I reviewed those and thought—wow, I get to build their treehouse, and all the furniture and palette within it. I sent over a super long list of inspiration links to the publisher; but most importantly I sent them over one of my very favorite homes I'd ever seen: Jens Risom's Block Island Retreat. It was the perfect inspiration for the Walnut treehouse.

Image by Floto + Warner via Dwell

In addition to sending along the treehouse idea, I sent a ton of links to amazing mid century furniture from 1st Dibs, and Wednesday was so receptive to all of it. She incorporated some of my favorite pieces and painted the Walnut world so beautifully. We were so careful with the palette to feel vintage yet fresh, and I'm so proud of what we created.

Talking about kitchen cabinet paint colors over on MyDomaine! I used Farrow and Ball's Pavilion Gray in this kitchen to keep it warm against the white walls and tile. The white oak plank flooring was barely stained—we used a simple wax finish to keep the wood looking really natural. Another color I mention in the article is Farrow and Ball's Studio Green. I LOVE dark paint colors and can't wait to use this one. We're talking about doing a kitchen island with it! And speaking of dark paint, I've got a few more projects in the works that I'm super excited about. We're getting ready to paint the outside of a house Greenblack by Sherwin Williams and it's going to be an amazing transformation.

Even though there are ten billion paint colors out there, I love to start by looking at Farrow and Ball's color card. Here's a little helpful hint: you can request a free color card from them and it's such a good starting point! Their colors are so rich and complex. Now I'm going to go restrain myself from painting the kitchen cabinets in our rental ;)

I realized I never shared this article that came out back in May in the LA Times about our apartment (!!!!). We moved to LA on somewhat of a whim back in 2013, and spent nearly 4 years there. It was such a wonderful, creative, difficult, and crazy time. Amy Preiser wrote this article that so perfectly encapsulated what our family is about—I was so moved when I read it the first time. So special!